Lenin was not frightened by Menshevik warnings that independent communist electoral work would let in the Black Hundreds. As we can see, he treated such arguments with the contempt they deserve:
"The ... flaw in this stock argument is that it means that the social democrats tacitly surrender hegemony in the democratic struggle to the Kadets. In the event of a split vote that secures the victory of a Black Hundred, why should we be blamed for not having voted for the Kadet, and not the Kadets for not having voted for us?
“We are in a minority’, answer the Mensheviks, in a spirit of Christian humility. The Kadets are more numerous. You cannot expect the Kadets to declare themselves revolutionaries’.
“Yes! But that is no reason why social democrats should declare themselves Kadets. The social democrats have not had, and could not have had, a majority over the bourgeois democrats anywhere in the world where the outcome of the bourgeois revolution was indecisive. But everywhere, in all countries, the first independent entry of the social democrats in an election campaign has been met by the howling and barking of the liberals, accusing the socialists of wanting to let the Black Hundreds in.
“We are therefore quite undisturbed by the usual Menshevik cries that the Bolsheviks are letting the Black Hundreds in. All liberals have shouted this to all socialists. By refusing to fight the Kadets you are leaving under the ideological influence of the Kadets masses of proletarians and semi-proletarians who are capable of following the lead of the social democrats. Now or later, unless you cease to be socialists, you will have to fight independently. In spite of the Black Hundred danger. And it is easier and more necessary to take the right step now than it will be later on. In the elections to the Third Duma ... you will be still more entangled in unnatural relations with the betrayers of the revolution. But the real Black Hundred danger, we repeat, lies not in the Black Hundreds obtaining seats in the duma, but in pogroms and military courts: and you are making it more difficult for the people to fight this real danger by putting Kadet blinkers on their eyes.” - V.I. Lenin quoted in Jack Conrad’s In the Enemy Camp: Using Their Parliament for Our Revolution (1992)
